July_Aug_2015_FINAL_62215_bleedless REV

CITY PRODUCE COMPANY • ROUSES HISTORY

Donald Rouse My grandfather, Joseph P. Rouse, or J.P., grew up in Marrero. His family — father, mother, brother — immigrated to Louisiana from Sardinia. There were farms in Marrero where houses stand now, and J.P. worked the family truck farm raising garden vegetables. Eventually, he got the idea to open a produce company, and in 1923, he and my grandmother, Leola Pitre, moved to Thibodaux. J.P. bought fruits and vegetables from big farms in Chackbay and Chocktaw and sold and shipped them to stores as far away as Alaska. Aunt Anna Mae My brother, Anthony, and my cousin, Ciro, worked at City Produce Company helping Daddy. Anthony and Ciro were as close as brothers.They worked side by side in the packing shed washing and sorting green onions (we called them shallots), which were then packed in trucks and rail cars filled with ice. City Produce Company also delivered potatoes, cabbage, squash, oranges, satsumas, tomatoes — anything grown locally. I stayed out of the packing shed. Instead, I’d sit on the screened-in porch of our house on Jackson Street in Thibodaux and clean and bunch shallots with friends — Marie, Michelle, Bernice and Bernice’s cousin. Donald Rouse Dad and Uncle Ciro took over City Produce Company when my grandfather passed away in 1954, but the big farms that drew my grandfather to Terrebonne and Lafourche Parishes were already starting to shut down. Big oil had become big business, and people in the area were able to find better wages working in oil fields than onion fields. Dad and Ciro eventually closed the produce company. In 1960, they opened a grocery store, Ciro’s Supermarket, in downtown Houma. Dad said they chose the name Ciro’s over Anthony’s because it had fewer letters in it, so the sign was cheaper to make.

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